Copyright

5 When the Journal was established, we accepted that a proportion of our most valuable output would be to feature good work recently published elsewhere, so the question of copyright arises.

Strictly, the manuscripts and diagrams of a paper are copyright but trivial changes are enough to make a manuscript a new creation. I am sure we all agree that this legalistic approach is dishonest.

All of us make presentations at conferences talking about our latest work. I am sure you, like me, present alternative diagrams to the ones published in papers. Your verbal or poster contributions are very different from your papers.

Could this approach be adopted when presenting material to us? It is always worth remembering that our manuscripts tend to be shorter and less rigorous than those offered in a formal Journal, because our readership is non-specialist so I do not think there should be a problem. Please use diagrams you have NOT published elsewhere and if you need to republish please use re-drafted diagrams.

I hope that in this way authors, colleagues and the publishing industry will not feel we are doing anything suspect.